Judging Obama

It is said that a man is known by the company he keeps. So it was during the long election season, when so many of us were concerned about Senator Barack Obama because of that very thing. We were troubled by that company, as much of it was anti-American; anti-Semitic; pro-Socialism; anti-white.

We didn’t make it up; we didn’t imagine it. We knew the kinds of people he felt comfortable with. We knew, because he told us.

“To avoid being mistaken for a [racial] sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

We knew because he showed us.

The then-Senator is now President, and he is currently in a position to do this country far more harm than he could ever have dreamed of. Unimaginable, incalculable harm. He is now in a position to appoint judges. Judges who will remain in their positions long after Obama has failed of re-election and is making millions on the lecture circuit at the most radical universities here and in Europe.

Obama’s first judicial appointment is rather troubling. David Hamilton is the President’s choice for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Currently, Judge Hamilton is US District Court Judge for Indiana.

Hamilton has a pretty clear leftist political record and was rated ‘not qualified’ by the ABA when President Clinton nominated him to the federal bench because his experience at that time was almost purely political, as opposed to legal and judicial. We need to read his decisions carefully to make definitive pronouncements, but it’s clear that at least some of his work on the bench demonstrates his willingness to embrace judicial activism.

“For example, Hamilton prevented the state of Indiana from implementing an abortion law that was substantially the same as the one the Supreme Court upheld in the Casey decision. He was reversed by the 7th Circuit (the court on which he has now been nominated to sit), which noted: ‘No court anywhere in the country (other than one district judge in Indiana) has held any similar law invalid in the years since Casey.'”

As an interesting aside, Judge Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Dawn Johnsen, has also been nominated by President Obama to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. How cozy.

Far worse than Judge Hamilton, however, is Obama’s choice of Harold Koh for legal advisor to the State Department. Mr. Koh is in fact a poster child for the damage that could be done to America. Meghan Clyne of the New York Post has done a fine job articulating why this man should not be approved and should never have been considered:

“…Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

It’s a job where you want a strong defender of America’s sovereignty. But that’s not Koh. He’s a fan of “transnational legal process,” arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish…

For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — a problematic document that we haven’t ratified — should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.

Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.”

Why does this matter? He’s not being appointed as a judge, only to a legal advisor position, some might say. The article continues with some disturbing foreshadowing:

…[T]he State job might be a launching pad for a Supreme Court nomination. (He’s on many liberals’ short lists for the high court.) Since this job requires Senate confirmation, it’s certainly a useful trial run.

What happens to Koh in the Senate will send an important signal. If he sails through to State, he’s a far better bet to make it onto the Supreme Court. So Senate Republicans have a duty to expose and confront his radical views.

This man must not be confirmed.

Our president is being true to his word. The company he keeps (and appoints as his advisors and policy makers) continues to tell us exactly who he is.

Stoutcat

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 4:48 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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